Brick by Brick
by CreepingMuse
Summary: The Gilbert house met its end in fire; the end of the Salvatore Estate wasn't nearly so dramatic. Life and death, joy and agony, that's the kind of stuff that even for an immortal doesn't come along every day. No, most of living, especially living forever, is about the moments in between, about inevitable erosion and decay.


_Hey guys. All kinds of feelings about 4x15, more than I could really say. So my dear friend JWAB challenged me to write about how another house met its fate-the original Salvatore house. Make sure you check out her own story, "No Trace of Us," for a devastating look at Jenna welcoming Jeremy into the Great Beyond. Hope you're all doing well._

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Take Route 5 out of Mystic Falls. Go past the BP Station. When you see an old man selling boiled peanuts out of slimy paper bags, hang a left. After another couple miles, the road dead ends at a stand of live oaks that stretch spindly limbs into the sky. Spanish moss hangs like fog.

At first, it's hard to tell why they built this road in the first place. But that's only if you don't know your history, and you've forgotten that this was once the road that led to the great Salvatore Plantation.

That was a long, long time ago. Now it's nothing to look at. A few chimneys, the bases of columns, odd bits of metal or scraps of paper. But mostly, it's returned to the black Virginia soil.

People always want to know what happened to this place. They expect some dramatic story: The Union torched it, they think. Or it was a field hospital during the War and all that pain wore away its soul and tore it to the very foundations. Failing human intervention, surely it was an earthquake, a flood, a meteor. Something with history and heft and weight to it.

The truth is rarely that exciting.

Here in Mystic Falls, we've got legends of vampires. We all know they aren't true, but if you could live forever, you'd find out pretty quick that life isn't all, or even mostly, about big moments. Life and death, joy and agony, that's the kind of stuff that even for an immortal doesn't come along every day. No, most of living, especially living forever, is about the moments in between, about inevitable erosion and decay.

Friends drift apart. Love grows, changes, turns cold. Eyes grow dim and hands grow wrinkled.

Houses fall to dust, brick by brick.

The Salvatore Estate was a gleaming ramble of a place, all gleaming pillars and Roman style, as Giuseppe proudly told anyone who would listen and not a few who wouldn't. Inside the place was crammed with stuff: cheap reproductions of Renaissance art, a tuneless but pretty piano, books that still needed their pages cut.

Less grand were the slave quarters, stationed a respectful distance away from the big house. Wattle and daub shacks, they were, hovels that dripped icicles in the winter and bred flies in the summer. But no one talks about the slaves. Most of the time everyone likes to pretend they never existed at all, as if the sprawling acres of cotton just picked themselves.

But if you walk down by the river, you can still see flat stones with crosses scratched onto them. Late at night, when the moon is full and the water is still, you might hear singing, low and husky, something about a chariot, coming to carry them home.

After Old Master Salvatore died, there were no sons to inherit the place and no one to work it since the slaves evaporated into freedom. Sure, there was the bastard who was promoted to heir, but he took the money and lived closer to town, nearer the whores and the tavern.

Sometimes you'd hear tell of strange lights at the house. Piano music, even. Sometimes people would be seen walking into the house as if in a dream, never to be seen again.

One day, it all stopped.

The decay started at the eaves. Curls of white paint flaked and fell like snow. A shutter fell askew.

Sometime in the 1880s, someone who claimed to be a Salvatore descendent tried to move back into the house. Wanted to fix it up, he said. Restore it to the glory it'd had before these carpetbaggers came and took over.

Poor bastard was found three days later in the parlor, eyes fixed and wide and staring. His heart had stopped, Dr. Fell said. Maybe this old place was haunted, after all, the townspeople murmured.

The columns went next. They weren't the marble Giuseppe had dreamed they'd be. No, they were wood and plaster, and when the termites and the damp heat got to them, they began to rot from the bottom up. The one on the right went first, sending half the portico tumbling with it. For years it stood that way, off-kilter and crazed. Sometime after the turn of the century, the porch fell all together.

Roundabouts 1912, the year all those Council members were murdered, bless their hearts, there were rumors that two men were seen in that mouldering pile. The old women swore they looked just like Damon and Little Stefan Salvatore, not aged a day since they died.

No one believed them.

The '30s brought drought and brush fire, which stained the remaining white paint with inky soot. The fine cherry floor collapsed, revealing a gaping hole of a cellar below, manacles still clinging to the walls.

With things being so hard then, people started scavenging in the house, looking for anything they might be able to sell for a meal or two. But all those fine paintings people talked about, the gleaming silver service imported from Florence, even the unopened books, they weren't there, rotting gently away.

They were all gone.

Fuckin' Yankees stealing our history, our _legacy _ from us, the men spat around mouthfuls of chaw.

Year by year, the land reclaimed the house. Oaks and scrappy pines spread their boughs in the parlor. Generations of rabbits were raised inside a velvet chair in the Old Man's study. Every now and then a hobo would light a fire in the remains of the dining room, but they never lasted there long, leaving only screams and odd stains behind them.

The remaining Salvatores set themselves up on the other side of town and scratched out a respectable enough living running a boarding house in an ugly Germanic sprawl that would have Giuseppe turning over in his grave. But those two nice boys named after their ancestors seem to like the place well enough, and we like having all the Founding Families back together again.

Maybe someone should take the old place down; it's a death trap. There's those that say it's haunted and we can't disturb the ghosts, but mostly, we do like our traditions here in Mystic Falls.

Reckon that place'll stand forever.


End file.
